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“Bag It,” an award-winning feature-length film that takes a closer look at America’s dependence on plastic, will be shown at 7 p.m. on March 20 in the Flex Theatre of the HUB-Robeson Center at University Park.

The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State presents “Plastics@thePalmer,” a diverse series of artist lectures, films, gallery talks and “entangled conversations” with scholars as part of the exhibition “Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials,” on view through June 17.

A chemical used in plastic packaging may get passed from mother to offspring during pregnancy, affecting the gut bacteria of the young. Researchers suggest this could increase the possibilities of inflammation-related conditions, such as colon cancer and type 2 diabetes, for the offspring later in life.

Sipping water from a bottle after a workout, microwaving a container of leftovers for lunch, giving the baby a bottle of milk: We use plastic every day, without even thinking about it. But numerous reports have suggested that exposure to bisphenol-A, an organic compound present in many food and beverage containers, could actually be damaging to our health. Is plastic dangerous?

Plastic is cheap. That's its niche. It's cheap and it's versatile, and so it is ubiquitous. But plastic, when it comes right down to it, is pretty mediocre stuff. Compared to metal, for example, says Evangelos Manias, the material properties of polymers are poor.

Pennsylvania grew 355 million pounds of button mushrooms—$274 million worth—during 1994-95, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

But many mushrooms became brown and spotted before making it to the soup pots and salad bowls of American homes. Those unsightly mushrooms headed to the cannery—resulting in lost profit for growers and less produce for consumers.